Indiana is only great at home. Kansas has no point guard. Michigan is weak on defense. Florida hasn’t beaten anyone. Duke is damaged goods.

If you are a college basketball coach whose team has a pulse, and by that we mean just about everyone who has drifted through the top 25 at some point, you know enough about basketball to recognize there is only a smidgen of truth to any of those statements. You know all those teams are loaded with talent and coached by champions, and that each has more than a month to address any lingering issues before the NCAA Tournament begins.

You also know this: Your team can get better, too. And those teams might not fix their problems, or the problems might leak through when the most intense NCAA Tournament pressure arrives.

And that knowledge might lead to this hopeful conclusion: In this particular season, you just might have a chance.

It’s probably true that in this particular season there is only a handful or two of teams with a genuine chance of winning the NCAA championship. On an annual basis, the NCAA Tournament tells us the same things about those that eventually become champions: 1) They are efficient both offensively and defensively; 2) they include multiple players who will reach the NBA, and usually multiple first-round picks; 3) they are coached by men who’ve won in the tournament before; 4) someone on the team has the ability to manufacture baskets on his own.

The teams that appear to fit these categories have been well known for a while: Indiana, Florida, Louisville, Syracuse, Duke and Arizona.

They have not been able to sustain excellence, though, either because of circumstances such as the injury to Duke forward Ryan Kelly or underlying issues.

The pressure of playing at the top can serve to strip away what a team is at its best and reveal the underlying weakness.

Indiana

The Hoosiers have more equipment to be champion than any team: Size, playmaking, length on the wings, a face-up power forward who can stretch defenses and a Final Four coach. But because coach Tom Crean had to rebuild the program from scratch, they’re also relatively new to success. They weren’t a great defensive team last season, and though they’ve improved they’ve had some slippage as the season advanced.

Illinois shot 44.8 percent against the Hoosiers on Thursday night, this from a team whose average is only 43.1 percent. But almost all the lousy defense IU played came in the final 4:07, when Illinois shot 5-of-7 from the field. The Illini had been at 41.2 percent before scoring on each of their final seven possessions and averaging 2.14 points on those trips.

Kansas

The Jayhawks began the season with the task of converting senior Elijah Johnson from three years mostly playing shooting guard — including as a starter on last year’s NCAA runner-up club — to running a team with designs on winning it all this time.

KU has enough of a system in place, and there’s enough talent around him, that Johnson is not being asked to carry the attack like an Allen Iverson. Since Jan. 1, however, Johnson has hit only 12-of-45 on 3-pointers and seen his percentage drop from 37.7 to 32.7. It would seem his struggles as a shooter are affecting the rest of his game; whether there is a cause-and-effect, his turnovers have jumped from 2.6 per game to 3.9.

Michigan

Of all the teams that have resided much of the year in the top five, Michigan has been the one with an efficiency rating that would seem to preclude serious title contention. The Wolverines have pro-level talent, but they’re smaller than most recent champions because they go with a single big man and a 6-6 wing, freshman Glenn Robinson III, as a nominal power forward.

That lack of size might be the biggest reason they rank only 37th in defensive efficiency according to KenPom.com. Every champion since 2003 — as long as Ken Pomeroy has been compiling these stats — has ranked in the top 20 nationally in both offensive and defensive efficiency. Over the past three games, the Wolverines are rebounding only 66 percent of opponents’ misses — down from 74 percent on the year. Indiana and Ohio State both shot better than 50 percent from the field against UM.

Florida

While the Gators were piling up 25-point SEC victories, their toughest games – Ole Miss, Missouri -- were coming at home. The Gators still haven’t beaten a road opponent with an RPI rating better than 59. Winning at Arkansas wouldn’t have changed that, but the Razorbacks are 14-1 at home, so playing at Bud Walton was a significant challenge for the Gators. They were never competitive in the game.

Florida has only a couple of chances to show its road mettle, at No. 35 Missouri on Feb. 19 and at No. 44 Kentucky on March 9, and then the SEC Tournament to show it’s a better neutral-court team than can be discerned from its wins over Middle Tennessee State and Air Force.

With these teams struggling to blossom, the teams that have to be most excited are those that labored more early but have some of the championship bases covered and might continue to evolve over the next month.

Kentucky has all the future pros and lottery picks you could want and ranks 23rd in both offensive and defensive efficiency. Pitt is a top-15 team in both categories, and there’s no doubt center Steven Adams will play in the NBA. Michigan State is 25th in offense and 14th in defense, certainly will send guard Gary Harris to the league and almost surely forward Adreian Payne and point guard Keith Appling, and coach Tom Izzo has taken six previous teams to the Final Four.

Since mid-January, those three teams are a combined 17-3. That might mean they’re improving rapidly and dramatically and enjoying life to the side of the stage. Perhaps when the pressure is directed toward those teams, we will see their flaws more clearly, as well. It does seem we’re going to need a bigger spotlight, though.